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hitting the wall
Several times in my life I have attempted to create a comic strip which could be syndicated to newspapers. [There was a time where that was a viable career choice, although nowadays everyone says the newspaper strip is doomed.] In every case, I wrote up a few dozen strips, none of which were very good, and then I hit a wall, I just couldn't come up with another idea.
About ten years ago, I came up with a strip idea which was much more fruitful. For the first time, I was writing strips that were actually good -- other people thought so, I still think so years later, this material was much better than my previous attempts -- and I was able to write piles of them. I racked up close to two hundred strips, it looked very promising --
and then I hit a wall. Suddenly I had no more ideas for that strip. And it's stayed that way ever since.
Thing is, if you're doing a strip, you're contractually obligated to keep it going every day. For years (at least five, ideally twenty or more). Hitting the wall simply isn't done. If you aren't able to keep creating new viable ideas every day, you shouldn't be doing this.
This tells me that I am not cut out for a career in strips. At least, not with any of the ideas I've had so far.
But it's also got me thinking about: do we have innate limits on what we can come up with? That varies from one individual to another? I mean, I think about bands like Collective Soul or The Charlatans, who have been cranking out albums regularly for twenty years, all of which are worthwhile, and their most recent work is some of their best -- they aren't running out of ideas by any means. But then there's The Charlatans' original inspiration, The Stone Roses, who really only had one good album in them. I mean, my God what an album, but still: just the one.
I dunno, I just think it's funny how that works...
no subject
Oh, give yourself a break. Here are several reasons why:
1. There is no agreement on what constitutes "new viable ideas" in your or anybody else's creative work. I can read old Calvin and Hobbes, which is widely appreciated as an apex of the genre, and find underlying patterns in Watterson's writing that he milked again and again and again. For instance... I'm not really sure if it was new and viable to do a dozen different Sunday strips in which Calvin fantasizes about something amazing, then finds himself sitting in a classroom, then sighs in the last panel. But people seemed to like the strip all the same.
2. Inspiration is not FedExed from heaven. You have to sit down and make it happen. "Writing comedy is easy; all you have to do is stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds." -- Douglas Adams
3. Given a contract with a syndicate, your motive to sit down and make inspiration happen would be so much higher than it's been in the past, there's no knowing what you might accomplish.
no subject
2: that I understand. I don't expect strip ideas to drop into my lap. When I work on coming up with new ideas, I work seriously. When I talk about hitting the wall, I mean that I have become incapable of making my forehead bleed, after staring at the page for serious hours, repeatedly over a series of at least months.
3: I've heard so many pros agree with you here. “When you have no choice but to produce, you produce.” My innate skittishness interprets this as “jump and trust that there's a net at the bottom” -- a daunting basis on which to sign a contract. (Perhaps no worse than taking out a mortgage, though?)
I find 1 to be the most intriguing point you raise here. I'm still chewing it over. For example, when is it a re-hash [bad] and when is it a running gag [fine]? How new does a new idea have to be?... You've chosen what could be the best possible example to illustrate this, too.
no subject
Here's my own answer: A running gag is fine when the latest instance of it
(a) still amuses the creator and
(b) still amuses a fraction of the audience that the creator deems satisfactory.
Evaluating (b) is so notoriously difficult that many artists choose to ignore it completely, though.
To pursue this particular example a little further, I think Watterson quit because he knew (a) wasn't happening and he suspected (b) would follow sooner or later.